When applied to specific domains and industries (for example healthcare, finance, law, science) traditional search systems are handicapped by approaches to storing, searching, transmitting, and publishing data and/or services that lack domain or industry specificity. Users (e.g., the people or computer system executing a search or publishing information) are frequently unable to obtain satisfying results using traditional search systems. For example, a search engine ranking documents based on a popularity measure but without domain knowledge may not be able to rank documents at the top of the list when they are relevant rather than popular. To be successful, such engines increasingly require that the user have knowledge about the domain in question to an extent that is both prohibitive and unreasonable.
Platforms for publishing (e.g., websites, etc.) have used techniques such as indexing and meta-tagging with meta-data to increase the descriptive power and indexation of documents to increase the likelihood that they are retrieved easily. However, these and other techniques have issues such as naming inconsistencies, inadequate or arguable choices of descriptive fields and difficulty in the maintenance of large vocabularies. Issues such as these have plagued the field of information extraction, search and distribution.
Using an ontology system is one approach to help manage these challenges. However, one limitation of a traditional ontology is that the concepts and relationships in many domains is dynamic and evolving so that the creation and ongoing maintenance of an ontology is time-consuming and labor-intensive. As a result, the practical application of a traditional ontology is limited.
As an example, to create a traditional ontology to a search system in the sports domain, one might model basic concepts and relationships such as 1) the type of sport, 2) the teams within each sport, and 3) the players and coaches for each team. Even in this example, the creation and maintenance of this ontology across a small number of sports may require the modeling of hundreds of teams and thousands of players and coaches. A complete and up-to-date ontology may require historical information and the models would need to be updated whenever the teams within a sport expanded or contracted or whenever a player or coach was drafted or hired, changed teams, or retired.